. Arabic dialectology : in honour of Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. BOSTON, LEIDEN, 2009.

Arabic Dialectology is a collection of articles written by leading scholars and distinguished young researchers. In print, they come together to pay homage to Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As befits the honouree's contributions and interests, the collection covers a wide spectrum of the field of Arabic linguistics and linguistics in general. Clive's earliest research on Arabic, in the late 1970's, was in socio- linguistics, specifically in Labovian variationist sociolinguistics, as it is nowadays known. At the time, sociolinguistics was certainly thri ving, but sociolinguists were still thin on the ground. In Europe, the Labovian approach took a leap forward at the hands of one of the contributors in this volume, Peter Trudgill, whose study of his beloved hometown has made the English city of Norwich itself almost a part of sociolinguistics. Not many places earn this privilege, but just over a decade after the Norwich Study, and thousands of miles away from England, a tiny island in the Arabian Gulf was given equal prominence in sociolinguistic research, this time at the hands of Clive Holes, then an 'alien' researcher in the State. Clive's research on language variation and change in Bahrain is the first work on Arabic dialects which is variationist 'to the core', executed with the passion of an ethnographer and the knowledge of an insider. His take on variation in Arabic has lent a fresh and realistic perspective to the subject. As such, his work in the field has not only led but also shaped subsequent studies on Arabic dialects.